The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950

1. From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism: Hilaire Belloc and the Roots of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

 From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism Hilaire Belloc and the Roots of the English Catholic Intellectual Community When he was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1890s, Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) established a Republican club with a few friends. Their patron was Thomas Jefferson, and their feast days included the anniversaries of the beheadings of Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France. Celebrating the club in verse several years later, Belloc observed, “We taught the art of writing things / On men we still should like to throttle: / And where to get the Blood of Kings / At only half a crown a bottle.” After taking his degree, Belloc moved to London, where he became an influential radical journalist. In 1906 he was elected as a Liberal member of Parliament and became a gadfly on the back benches, where he sat until 1910. By 1920, however, Belloc was calling himself a monarchist, convinced that if “some form of Monarchy does not succeed to the lost inheritance of the House of Commons, the State will lose its greatness.”1 How had the erstwhile radical who had joked about the blood of kings become in little more than a decade an advocate for the restoration of monarchy? The answer to this apparent conundrum is significant not because of the light it sheds on the intellectual transformation of one man but because Belloc proved to be a man of C h a pt e r 1 Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community ­ extraordinary influence. More than anyone else, Belloc was responsible for articulating the political and economic creed that bound the English Catholic intellectual community of the interwar era. It was through his reaction against both Victorian Liberalism and the New Liberalism of Edwardian England that this community was forged. Understanding Belloc’s intellectual transformation is vital, therefore, to comprehending its genesis. Intellectual Foundations Hilaire Belloc’s roots, both familial and intellectual, lay in the disparate political traditions of English radicalism and French revanchiste republicanism. Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 in the suburban village of La Celle St. Cloud, thirteen miles west of Paris. His father, Louis Belloc (1830–72), was a French barrister, and his mother, Eliza­ beth “Bessie” Parkes (1829–1925), was English. Both his parents came from distinguished families. Belloc’s French forebears linked him to the literary and artistic worlds of Paris. Louis Belloc was the son of Hilaire Belloc (1786–1865), a portrait painter of some standing, and his Franco-Irish wife, Louise Swanton (1796–1881), a noted literary figure, the author of children’s stories and a biography of Byron (with a preface by Stendhal) and the translator of Dickens and other celebrated nineteenth-century authors. Belloc’s English grandparents connected him to the tradition of radical politics in Britain. His grandfather Joseph Parkes (1796–1865) had been a well-known figure in Whig and Radical political circles in his native Birmingham and later London, while Parkes’s wife, Eliza Priestley (1797–1877), was the granddaughter of the eighteenth-century English scientist and radical agitator Joseph Priestley.2 Belloc’s mother combined both the political engagement of her father and the artistic interests of her French in-laws. Before her marriage, Bessie Belloc had been devoted to the nascent struggle for­ women’s emancipation. Her ambition, however, had always been to be a poet, and she published two volumes of poetry in the 1850s to From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism  modest success. Her closest friends included some of the most notable writers and artists of the day, in particular George Eliot (­Marian Evans), who was her frequent and longtime correspondent. What set Bessie Parkes apart from her literary friends, from her family, and from English Radicalism in general was her religion. Raised in an irreligious although ostensibly Unitarian home and influenced as a young woman by the agnosticism of friends such as Eliot, she had nonetheless converted to Catholicism in 1864. According to her daughter, it was Bessie Belloc’s concern for the poor that had drawn her to Christianity, and it had been “the active, ordered charity of the Catholic Church,” which she had witnessed in the work of the Irish Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of Charity, that had led her to convert to Catholicism. She would inculcate in her son not only her Catholic faith but also the concern for the less fortunate, for social justice, that...